From Pasta to Weeds: Measuring Busyness in a Post-Apocalyptic Garden
When you can measure your zucchini and cucumber harvest in cords, you know you've had a good year.
As a young bride, I collected dozens of cookbooks, among them Passionate Vegetarian by Crescent Dragonwagon. In it, she wrote that we can measure how busy we are by how many nights we eat pasta for dinner. Granted, that book was written in 2002 before the Great Villification of Carbohydrates. But take out pasta and insert x, and the formula is still a useful one.
My weekly to-do list is currently spread across three pages, and yet somehow my days still only contain 24 hours, two facts that lead to occasional hyperventilation. After reading Gay Hendricks's oft-recommended book The Big Leap earlier this summer, I decided to shift my language about time, the better to reduce the sense of scarcity and overwhelm that arise when I use language like, “There isn’t enough time to do it all!” or “I don’t have time to do that,” while shrieking, rending my clothing, and pounding my fists on the floor.
Instead, when I find myself behind on a few – or 32 – items, I calmly say, “I haven’t addressed that situation yet,” or, “I will do that soon,” and simply weep quietly, no hyperventilation or fist-pounding in sight.
It’s very Zen.
We’re each the best judge of what to substitute for pasta in our version of the Crescent Dragonwagon equation. For me, one solid yardstick of busyness is the state of my garden. I can just glance it over, and ask myself, “Does my garden look post-apocalyptic? Does it make the house appear as if abandoned for more than 4 years? Could my garden be a convincing backdrop for a horror scene in a Stephen King novel? Are children scared to walk in?”
If I answer yes to one or more – or, say, all – of those questions, my life may be overly full.
Thank you to the deer* my garden is not overly full this morning. Busy-brain win: remembering to shut the electric fence gates. Busy-brain fail: Forgetting to turn the electric fence on.
Fun nature fact: deer can jump really high.
They took the pole beans. They took my next crop of bush beans. They took most of the chard. They took out two mammoth sunflowers, and they nibbled my next crop of lettuce. Unfortunately, they did not take any of the horsetail, which I would gladly pay them a bag of corn to consume.
But they also didn’t take a lot of the lettuce, or any of the cucumbers, parsley, larkspur, poppies, and dahlias.
Maybe the garden felt too post-apocalyptic even for deer. Or maybe they just couldn’t find those crops amid the weeds. Whatever the reason, I made two trips back and forth to carry all the cucumbers, parsley, zucchini, and flowers into the kitchen, and there’s still more to come.
Weeds and deer notwithstanding, I have a productive garden. Later, I plan to make pickles, zucchini soup, zucchini fritters, and pesto.
What’s another page on the to-do list?
*Euphemism for, “Curse you, deer!” **
**Euphemism for something I can’t type here. This is a family essay.